320GB HD almost full

I have a bad problem. I have only 17.7GB free on a 320GB HD.

This is day 3 of my problem. I have run AVG, scanned with Housecall and ESET NOD32, MBAM, HjT and am clean.

I ran WinDirStat today and most of my resources are occupied by over 168GB of .rcd files. I cannot locate any information about these specific types of files, but as near as I can figure, they have something to do with the backups of Avanquest Fix-it Utilities file undeleter (which I have DISABLED) and/or MXCYCLE. I remember having similar problems with MXCYCLE back about 10 years ago, don't remember how to fix this though.

I'm not sure if it is safe for me to delete these .rcd files in the application data folder. I need help quickly because I'm running out of resources here. Any ideas?

TIA,
Bootsmom

thanks for your reply Ztruker..

That's interesting because I don't use Avanquest System Suite 8, I am running Avanquest Fix-it Utilities 9 Professional. I believe they might be the 'undo' files after I use the registry cleaner. In any case, I have over 22,000 individual files which begin with C:\_Backup...(with a file extension of .rcd) taking up a LOT of space..... do you know if it is safe for me to delete them from my application data folder?

thanks for your responses folks. I finally managed to expand all folders and found that the culprit was Fix-it Utilities Recovery Commander wreaking the havoc. Needless to say something must have gone wrong with my Fix-it install, as I did NOT have Recovery Commander set to recover anything. I found approx 168GB of Fix-it backups, including File Undeleter backups as well (again: not selected in the settings). Seems Fix-it 9 had a mind of its' own.

In any case, I had help from a friend last evening who told me it is safe to delete all the .rcd backups. Unfortunately for me, it's going to take quite some time, as most filenames are too big for the recycle bin, so I bypassed it, but still getting the nag message. *sigh* thanks again :)

Boots

smarteyeball said:

To avoid conflicts down the track, is there a way to delete these backups from within the application? Never ever heard of that app, let alone used it, but it would be odd if that option was omitted.

Manually deleting them shouldn't hurt windows, but it may cause issues with the app.

Thanks for your question smarteyeball. Uh no... there isn't a way to delete them from within the app (you'd think huh?). I've been using Fix-it for the utilities only for as long as it's been available....certainly over 10 years now....without incident (until now).

more replies follow....and an update.

thanks for your thoughts "A Guy" .

In the past week I have been able to delete the files only. As of this writing the _Backup.RC folder contains no more files, but 558 folders which are "undeletable" due to their names being too long for the recycle bin. When I try to delete them by bypassing the recycle bin, same result: unable to delete. They won't delete in safe mode either (more about that later). By deleting the FILES only, I was able to recover 45 GB, so now I'm up to 72GB space from a paltry 17GB.

I have requested help from Avanquest, but....won't hold my breath.

In the past week (with the help of a tech buddy) I have run CHKDSK and sfc /scannow, sent him the logs and he determined any errors reported were fixed (there weren't all that many).

I did the online scan with Housecall....no infection. I have run ESET and AVG (full computer scan) Malwarebytes (full scan) and HiJack this....all scanned clean.

I have also taken many screenshots of WinDirStat results, this one below is the most recent. One thing I found odd is that the time shown (last change) is usually 4 hours ahead of the time I ran the scan, and that has been the case since scan 1 on August 12.

My most recent WDS scan is below.

Note line two......178GB of "unknown" ...that's what I'm missing. I am completely lost, tired and frustrated. Note the discrepancy in disk sizes in the properties screenshot (sorry they are so big ! yikes)